Myth of G

[Sergio Meira S.C.O.]

Just lurking-- but I couldn't help noticing that this 'Myth of G'
discussion is getting interesting.

Being interested in descriptive linguistics-- and actually wanting to make
a career out of writting the 'grammars' that were so contemptuously
alluded to-- I'd like to see the alternatives. In what way would the
'no-grammar' advocates describe understandably a given human language?
Given the recurrent regularities, etc. that one finds when looking at an
unknown language, is there a better way to talk about them than saying,
'here's a conjugation', 'here's a paradigm', 'here's a construction',
regardless of what reality underlies these regularities? And can you guys
give me references to it, in case there is?

I'd certainly disagree with anyone who wanted to see a grammatical
description as 'a map of the brain', 'a map of the internal knowledge of
the speaker', etc., or who would want to locate it somewhere in the
brain. I'm more of a hocus-pocus linguist; I tend to think
grammars (in the plural) are convenient devices for us to catalog observed
regularities. Would this vision of grammars still make them objectionable?

--Sergio Meira
Rice University
meira at ruf.rice.edu